Saturday, November 15, 2008

Not All Detainees Victims of Circumstance

As a follow on to the previous post, the New York Times--perhaps the most fierce critic of Bush Administration homeland security policies--suggested on the day before the election that maybe, just maybe, some of the Gitmo detainees deserve to be there after all:

They were called the Dirty 30 — bodyguards for Osama bin Laden captured early in the Afghanistan war — and many of them are still being held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Others still at the much-criticized detention camp there include prisoners who the government says were trained in assassination and the use of poisons and disguises...an extensive review of the government’s military tribunal files suggests that dozens of the roughly 255 prisoners remaining in detention are said by military and intelligence agencies to have been captured with important terrorism suspects, to have connections to top leaders of Al Qaeda or to have other serious terrorism credentials...The next president will have to contend with sobering intelligence claims against many of the remaining detainees...But as a new administration begins to sort through the government’s dossiers on the men, the analysis shows, officials are likely to face tough choices in deciding how many of Guantánamo’s hard cases should be sent home, how many should be charged and what to do with the rest.